by icycalm » 09 Jan 2015 20:23
I'd like to give everyone an idea of the kind of campaigns I make.
I only run officially published adventures. Why? Because they are the best. DMs who improvise adventures or who write their own are giving their players an inferior experience, because:
1. Improvisation is inherently inferior. This is why stage plays and movies are written in advance and not improvised in front of the audience or the camera on the spot: because if they were they'd suck. There's no way around this. Improvisation sucks and only people who don't understand how art works practice it and defend it.
2. If a DM could write adventures at, or higher than, the level of the published ones, he'd have his adventures published. It's as simple as that. Are there exceptions to this rule? Maybe, but I bet you anything you want that your previous DM was not among them, because that's how bad the chances are that any given DM will be an exception to this rule: they are astronomical. Besides, even IF a DM COULD write adventures at the level of the published ones, we are talking DOZENS if not HUNDREDS of hours of work ON TOP of the work a DM must normally do. So maybe I COULD write an adventure at the level of the published ones, but I just don't have the time for it. Or, if I had the time, I'd rather write a novel with the same ideas instead. Or I'd rather just put the time I am saving by using official adventures into playing more sessions, because playing is more fun to me (which is why I wouldn't be a very good writer of adventures in the first place: the born writer prefers the writing over the playing, and vice versa).
This doesn't mean that there is no improvisation in my campaigns. Even within the scope of an official adventure, there is still tons of room for improvisation, given that there is no "correct" way to finish an adventure: your party will botch as many adventures as they successfully complete, and the campaign will go on regardless (not to mention that "successful completion" can also take many forms, many of which will need to be improvised). And then of course the adventures will have to be linked into a campaign, which again will require considerable improvisation.
So, what I want to create is the following. I want to create a world into which ALL the currently available official adventures are SIMULTANEOUSLY in play, and where players decide which ones to play, and in which order. Imagine an overworld map, like the ones you get in a game like Baldur's Gate, only instead of this map containing locations of a SINGLE game, it contains ENTIRE GAMES. So that by moving towards one such location, you are moving towards a brand-new game. And of course instead of the map featuring just the area around Baldur's Gate, it will feature the entire Realms.
Of course, the map will not contain 10th-level adventures, when your party first starts out. It will contain all the adventures (at least a dozen of them, if not more) which your party can handle at that point, and as you play adventures, and your characters level up, more and more locations/adventures will appear (including in demiplanes like Ravenloft and all the planes in Planescape).
So, you might be in the middle of an adventure, and hear news about a war happening halfway across the world. This is a signal from me to you that there is an adventure there which you are capable of tackling, if you choose to. I want you to have at least half a dozen such "adventure hooks" once you finish your first adventure, so that the party will have to discuss and decide on which one to pursue.
At the same time, rejecting an adventure doesn't mean it's off the table forever. This is because adventures usually have several starting hooks, and if you reject one now, I could try another hook again a few weeks down the line. Think of it like GTA, in a way, where there are a bunch of main missions, which you can tackle in any order, and a bunch of side missions, that you can tackle or not tackle. Only here ALL of them can be tackled in any order, and all of them can be tackled or not tackled, simply because I have so many available to me (and I have so many available to me because I have the 22GB torrent; in the old days this was impossible without spending 5,000 dollars on the game, and so the richer your DM, the more deep the campaign that you could play).
And of course, there will also be player-driven mini-adventures in all of this. I may not want to write an entire adventure of my own, but if one player has put it into his head to raise an undead army or become the ruler of a castle -- and as long as his companions are willing to support his plans -- I will let him attempt whatever it is he wants to attempt, and see what comes out of it. So, if he wants to buy a castle and see if he can run it, I will design a castle for him and a situation in which to try it out (taking, as always, as much of this material as possible from officially published products). If a player wants to travel to a distant desert or jungle or continent, simply to see what's there, I will accommodate that too (while throwing on his way as many officially published adventures as I can, so that, if he ever does make it to his final destination, it will feel like a major accomplishment to him -- not to mention the OTHER officially published adventures I will have ready for him once he reaches there).